Heat waves could undermine Europe’s targets against global warming, given the need to adopt cooling measures for buildings, the executive director of Casa da Arquitetura said in an interview with Lusa.
“Europe is currently at an impasse. On the one hand, it wants to reach environmental goals and save energy, not have air conditioning, nor other sources of energy expenditures. On the other hand, it is suffering from climate change, which forces buildings to have air conditioning, which is completely contrary to the targets it set,” the architect Nuno Sampaio stated.
Data released on Wednesday by Eurostat revealed that energy consumption to cool homes in the European Union doubled in just six years, driven by rising temperatures and greater use of air conditioning.
“It will probably be the continent that suffers most from climate changes, especially the north of Europe, the south too, but the north has always designed cities to respond to the climatic conditions we had, which was cold,” he observed.
In architecture, he recalled, work used to aim at preventing the heat produced inside homes from dissipating. “Very large thermal insulations were made on the outside of buildings, and they heated the houses, and the important thing was not to let the heat escape,” Nuno Sampaio said as he analyzed the situation of Central and Northern European countries.
“The cold will continue to exist, but according to climate projections, high temperatures will be increasingly frequent and intense due to global warming. “This is something that is already irreversible,” he noted.
Architects are currently studying how to adapt housing and cities to extreme heat and heavy rainfall, caused by greater evaporation.
“We have to be able to accommodate this new situation,” said Nuno Sampaio, who is also the curator of the Ibero-American Architecture Biennale, scheduled for the first week of November, in Brasilia, where these topics will be discussed.
“The concern at times of the year in Europe is to have a heat peak, which heats the city, the public space, and buildings are not prepared to dissipate this heat,” admitted Nuno Sampaio, citing as an example the lack of cross-ventilation, with windows designed not to open or of small size.
In the case of Nordic countries, with little light, large windows do not have solar protection. “On the contrary, what they wanted was light to enter, so as not to spend on interior lighting.”
Similarly, the large glass walls of buildings, being exposed today to a “stronger sun,” let in a temperature that is “very high,” explained Nuno Sampaio, noting that unlike other countries more accustomed to high temperatures, in Central and Northern Europe, the cooling systems are not prepared.
“They were not designed for that, they have central heating floors, with radiant flooring, radiator heating, they do not have air conditioning,” the architect emphasized.
For Nuno Sampaio, Europe, which had stood out until now in the fight against climate change, could become “the first major land area to suffer directly,” calling into question the targets it had set to mitigate global warming.
Facades worked with elements that help lower the building’s temperature and vegetation are part of the solutions listed by Nuno Sampaio, within the scope of options with lower environmental impact.
“Europe is living this drama at the moment because it is in a territory that was designed to protect from the cold and keep the heat inside the home, and now has to deal with extremely high temperatures and solar exposure. It does not have the conditions, neither in city architecture, nor in construction, nor often in the cooling infrastructure itself,” concluded Nuno Sampaio, who intends to involve the governments of Portugal, Spain and Brazil in discussing these issues at the Ibero-American Architecture Biennale.
“When architecture does not help, technology helps. But in the case of technology, air conditioning is not very good for the environment,” he warned.
Europe, the architect considered, is facing a dilemma that needs a short-term answer, because it is already suffering the effects of climate warming, while transforming the city and architecture implies medium- and long-term interventions.
